


We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd

by elizasky



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 16:25:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14596986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizasky/pseuds/elizasky
Summary: Anne and Diana have been reading some Walt Whitman.





	We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd

In blueberry time, we walk the rock shore, pails thumping against our skirts and little Fred dancing along the path before us.

Your raven beauty balks account; my love for your beauty balks account. Your supple strength showing plain through calico and ribbons, your stride confident over spray-soaked rocks and scrub-brush trails. I have read of act-poems; walking this cliffside, you are an anthology. Flexing foot and swaying hip, the crux of elbows and implied knees enjambed, flowing one into another.

Beyond the dark nimbus of your hair, the rolling ocean, full swells and fathomless deeps. Beneath your fingers, the blueberry bushes, bursting, abundant, filling our pails and our pantry with sweet summer preserved.

What need have we of ambrosia, when we have cheese and apples and the crusty bread we have kneaded with our own hands? Blueberries still warm from the sun and Adam’s ale clear and crisp from the spring and a quilt you pieced in wintertime. Did your firelight-flashing needle dream of this afternoon?

Insubstantial you: your laughter when Fred spins until he falls; your glance when you think I have looked away; your breath when you call my name.

Substantial you: your lips berry-stained; your ankles peeking beneath carelessly rumpled skirts; your hand on mine, spanning the nine-patch.

How long do we sit this way? Until the salt mist has cooled our sunburnt brows. Until the birds have forgotten to fear us. Until purple-speckled Fred has fallen asleep in a drift of shaded clover.

Come to me, love, with blueberry kisses. Taste the berries I have eaten and the bread we have baked together. Lie with me on your quilt, in our eyrie above the sea.

Come to me, love, with wind-soft sighs. Pull me down among the grasses and the ruins of our feast. Brush a copper curl from my cheek and keep your fingers in my hair. Stroke my back as your buttons fall away and I find again your swelling, swollen breast. Laugh when I pause to call you bosom friend, the fairy sound of your merry voice swept away in a gasp.

We two, how long we were fool’d.

Shall I recite for you the lines that bring you ever to my mind? Shall I tell you that we are two resplendent suns, balancing ourselves orbic and stellar? That we are seas mingling, cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other? That we have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two?

I would recite these lines for you, love, but they are insufficient. We will write our own lines, harmonizing with our brethren in keys unknown to bearded bards.

We are dune grass, swaying with the lifting breeze, roots entwined.

We are a shimmer of shells, opalescent, ever-shifting.

We are two seals, slipping over water and ice, slick and pliant.

We are thieves, borrowing without shame where we overlap.

Disheveled beneath the scudding clouds, we lie and rest our heads together, hair undone, bright and dark intermingling. Whatever else may come, we will have the blueberries, and the jam to carry us through the winter until we return to this shore. With every taste, remember that I will love you as long as the sun and moon shall endure.

**Author's Note:**

> "We Two, How Long We Were Fool'd" by Walt Whitman
> 
> There's a bit of "I Sing The Body Electric" in there as well.


End file.
